There seems to be general agreement across a range of academic disciplines that the quality of urban space is changing such that, over the last twenty years, town and city spaces have become more ‘aestheticised’ (Harvey, 1989; Featherstone, 1991; Hannigan,1998; Jacobs, 1998). There precise meaning of the word ‘aesthetics’ as it is used in this context is debatable, but it seems to refer to the way that urban design has been adopted as the new planning directives. That is, the layout and the material components of urban spaces are increasingly produced according to visual design criteria.
A number of trends have been identified as contributing to this change. Some analysts detect the increasing importance of urban design to developers and local councils keen to sell themselves in a global market as attractive investment or tourist locations. For others, the growing significance to urban social life of commodity capitalism and consumption has spectacularised urban space; here the emphasis is more on ubiquitous technologies of branding and advertising. All of this work, if in different ways, emphasises the importance of the visual to urban aesthetics.
Many of these accounts of aestheticised urban spaces also make claims about concomitant changes in how urban spaces are experienced. In policy circles, for example, a causal link between urban design and the quality of urban life is often assumed. Several academic theorists have returned to earlier generations of critics writing in different moments of intensified specularity – Benjamin, Simmel and Debord – to argue that seduction and distraction are now key urban experiences.
Few of these claims have been interrogated empirically, however, despite the development more recently of the argument that the experiences of its inhabitants should be more closely attended to in academic accounts of urban spaces. In fact, in debates about the aestheticisation of the urban, those using these spaces are almost always constructed as passively responding to urban design stimuli. The focus of discussion has only very rarely shifted from the production of these spaces to a consideration of how people experience them in specific and situated encounters. It has also been noted that several of the professions most centrally involved in the production of aestheticised spaces seem uncertain about users’ experiences of those spaces, for example outdoor advertising, architecture and public art.
Among geographers in particular, there is currently great interest in the everyday use of spaces, and in the way in which the experience of those spaces is a consequence of complex, embodied practices that constitute and animate them. ‘Experience’, in this work, is a consequence of the embodied practices which depend on tacit knowledges for their competence. This work raises a number of important questions in relation to the claimed aestheticisation of urban space, however.
To answer these questions, we've relied on both conventional social science methods such as participant observation, a large-scale survey, go-alongs and photo-elicitation interviews, as well as some more experimental ways of working with our data, such as the maps and animations you can find on this website.
Our results can be found the papers and other resources pages on this site.
© urban aesthetics 2008